


Fissures

by limerental



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Both outward and internalized, Canon-Typical Violence, Excessive Flowery Prose, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Trans Will Graham, Transphobia, Very unhealthy depictions of coping with gender dysphoria, this is hannibal fic you guys do i have to warn for that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-18 23:57:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22035277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: “What do you want, Margot?”“Not what you think,” she says. “Not what my brother will think.”“Because I don't have the right parts for your... proclivities?”“Because you don't have the right parts for what I need.”
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 11
Kudos: 57





	1. prologue to the prologue

**Author's Note:**

> What it says on the tin. This started as an attempt to tweak canon in the few small ways it would take to make Will Graham a trans man. It accidentally became a bit more than that.
> 
> Please heed the warnings. This is not a soft and friendly trans story. Note that the author is trans, in case that matters to anyone.

* * *

It begins before the beginning, as it will be at the end.

In the red dark, embraced and entombed, something shivers and splits. The womb is a black sea, the waves a rushing heartbeat.

Something pulses among the membranes and begins to rise. An embryo, a wet bundle of nerves and tissue.

Something happens there. A fissure. A wound that scars before the flesh is formed. Something knits back together wrong.

It is not quiet in the dark. The silence rushes with heat. The unborn resists and then yields, resists again. It is not quiet.

There is a heartbeat. There is an ocean. There is a tomb.

As there will be when it all begins again, remade.

* * *


	2. scene setting

_“What happened to your window?” asks the brown-haired girl, and you imagine a moment telling her the truth._

_A man died here in this room. He happened to my window, and I happened to him._

_“Stag got lost in the storm. Came through there. Got a few scratches getting him out.”_

_“Are you scarred?” she asks and you feel a laugh bubbling up in your throat. You could bark with laughter until you're wheezing. You are more scar than person. You are scar tissue twisted into the shape of a man._

_“Probably more than I know.”_

_“I'll show you mine if you show me yours.” She doesn't know what she's asking for. She doesn't know who she is asking._

_You could tell her this, warn her, describe the way your body thrummed with fire after the kill. How you hooked your clawed fingers into His sneering face and twisted until the smooth composure gave way to a red mask of gore. How the body ran like water and was the boy's again and you carried it in your teeth back to Him._

_“I don't have the right parts for your proclivities, Margot.”_

_You don't know what parts are left. You don't know what has risen in their place._


	3. she knows

The hollows of her cheeks stretch in the lamplight. Bruised shadows trail her collarbones also and the dip between her breasts. His thumb hooks under the wire of her bra there, pressing the calloused flat of it to her sternum. Her bone-white fingers are on his hand, skirting the chafed wounds on his knuckles.

The raw splitting of the skin has healed away quickly. Hand injuries are swift like that, fading to an itch almost overnight.

The shattered glass had taken a long night to sweep up and bag, the yammering dogs shut up in another room to protect their paw pads from an errant sliver. When the dustpan had collected all it could, he took a wet rag to the wooden floor, along the seam of the baseboards, careful to catch any minuscule, fractured pieces.

The fingers on his knuckles flex and shift to reach for his clothed torso, hooking under a button like he hooks under her bra.

There, Margot pauses with a manicured fingernail drawn under the button, and it is then with a cool gush of realization that Will knows that she knows something she shouldn't. Icy rivulets slip down his scalp and prickle along his neck. The press of her fingernail feels inquisitive, a question that isn't hers to ask. He waits for her to put it to words, to drag it out into the furnace-warmed air.

He could not explain, if pressed, how he knows what she knows from just the tremble of her nail. But he could not explain how he so easily knows many of the things he knows. It feels tangible, her knowledge, like a bit of string held tight between them. She could tug with the right pressure and see him unravel.

Margot's silk shirt hangs half-open, blue veins spilled along the curve of her breast rising with each breath. She does not speak. He blinks and she is wearing a tartan scarf knotted tight. He blinks and her throat is swallowed up in red fissures.

“Margot,” he says, his voice stiller than he anticipates. Funny, how stillness comes and settles. How now he stays at rest amidst the trembling of the earth. A gyroscope; a balanced instrument. “What has he told you?” He knows he does not have to specify the _He_. The stag casts a long shadow, and _He_ has begun to swallow or already swallowed Margot too.

“Your... parts,” she says, and her fingernails slip to pop the button of his shirt, then another. Her touches are cold and fluttery, pulling loose the fabric all the way down until a bare sliver of skin shows to his waistband. A knuckle drifts through the downy hair below his belly button and pauses. “Your scars.”

The other night, Randall Tier stood behind him as he stretched taut the plastic over the place where the window used to be and nailed it down, sealing out the wind that tried to whisper through and steal the flapping tarp from his fingers.

“ _Do you know what it's like when the skin you're wearing doesn't fit?_ ” the boy had said in the museum, and empathy had yawned like a chasm, snapping into sharp reality in ways it only did when Will could share that raw pain directly.

“ _I can imagine._ ” He has felt that raw pain. He has felt it and feels it.

Margot returns to work her own buttons free, and he remembers his thumb still pressed to her sternum, can feel the goosebumps as his fingers flex along her chilled ribs.

“I said I'd show you mine if you show me yours.”

She shrugs her shirt down her shoulders, and Will catches sight of them in the mirror, the ridged, red lines that begin to shape a story.

Will's gaze dips beneath her chin, even as he knows she is peering into his face, scrutinizing. The old urge to avoid eye contact sinks like a heavy weight. He has been better with it, these days. After locking eyes with the beast, all gazes seem easier. The thing manifesting in the corner of your eye that you dare not look straight at no longer fazes him, so why would an ordinary face?

He meets Margot's eyes.

She is a sheen of tears, fogged with dark eye shadow. He can see it all happen in the wet reflection of her pupils. He assumes Mason Verger's skin, drawing high his leather belt, letting it sing out and draw welts. _My inheritance_ , he thinks and sneers and rips and takes and defiles and--

He gusts in a sharp breath and returns to himself, drops his eyes to her parted red lips.

“What do you want, Margot?”

“Not what you think,” she says. “Not what my brother will think.”

“Because I don't have the right parts for your... proclivities?”

“Because you don't have the right parts for what I need.”

 _And what do you need?_ he thinks but does not ask. He has seen it in her eyes, in her scars. Freedom. She wants a way out.

“He didn't tell me,” she says. “Not in so many words. I didn't know until I looked you up in his book. Way back.”

 _And what do you know?_ he doesn't ask.

He is very aware, suddenly, of being barefoot. He thinks of the fissuring glass and how easily a translucent sliver could slip into the meat of his foot. He thinks of the body on the black floor, on the black dining table, stretched over bones in the black dark of the museum until the itching skin finally fit, finally, finally. Not a becoming so much as a realignment to that which was already there.

She moves to him again, parting his open shirt and slipping inside. It is as vulnerable as being stark naked. Left and right as one, her slow hands drag the puckered, horizontal scars that fade below each nipple, glowing fresh in the ochre lamplight.


	4. she does not know

In some other world that splits from this one, he leans to kiss her. The backs of his knees hit the bed, and they tumble together. She unfolds for him, and he gives her what she needs. He sees what she has truly come for in the glimpse of her doe-soft eyes, and he gives it anyway, willingly, knowingly. _Here is your freedom. Take it._

Instead, Margot cracks open the whiskey and folds herself into a chair, legs tucked under her body. Will fetches glasses, ice in hers, his neat, and she pours for the both of them. He sits across from her.

He has re-buttoned his shirt, and she has not. His ability to make eye contact has flown away again, and he stares somewhere near where the pantyhose stretches thin on her knees.

“So, you were a woman, then?” she asks curtly, and he looks to see her taking small cat sips of her whiskey.

“I was never--” He takes a deep breath through his nose and lets it out.

There is disorientation, rather than pain. Time has dulled the sharpness and the clawing need to escape from his own body, from a stranger's perception, from vocabulary itself. He used to taste bile at the mention of the shape of his own skin. The very words for his anatomy bubbling up with nausea.

He remembers a moment in the morgue: the shape of a grey cadaver on a slab. The cool folds of genitalia marked the body _Jane Doe_ , but he touched an ankle and saw him. A young man with a mop of curls who bound his chest and bloodied his knuckles and garbled lyrics for a vibrant garage band. His upper lip a dust of fine hairs coming in. His eyebrows artfully mussed. Hunched against the cool formica of the bathroom counter while his partner pressed the pinch of a needle into his buttocks. The coroner's report read as a clinical discussion of the injuries inflicted to the body's genitalia ( _mutilation of the labia, removal of the clitoris_ ) and Will was sick in the trash can as he stumbled out of the imagining.

Surprise at how time has softened the terror. A pang of guilt comes with it. It was once erasure that haunted him and then exposure and now, a peal of shame rings through him at the forgetting.

 _You scratched and dug out and clawed your ascent into manhood, and now, this is the man you choose to become?_ The voice is Randall Tier's, a blotted shadow hovering in the place where the tarp darkens the broken window.

“Sorry,” Margot says, and Will remembers he is meant to be offended by her word choice, not lost in recollection. _Woman_ was always a threat, rather than a reality. _Girl_ carried more weight with it, more darkness. _Girl_ was his first chyrsalis, and _Man_ his unfurling wings. “I know you aren't meant to ask like that. It's a force of habit. To be blunt where bluntness will be tolerated.”

“How can you be so sure it will be tolerated here?” Though he wishes to, he does not speak the words through gritted teeth.

“So, how would you say it, then?” she asks.

“I was... assigned female,” he says carefully, his throat working between words. He has never loved that phrasing either, finds even shaping the word on his tongue to be a foreign sensation. Like dusting off an old mirror and peering down a long way into a tomb. “I was a girl for a time. Or thought I was. Others thought I was. Until, it became clear that I wasn't.”

“And now? You're a man?”

“Is that in question?” The tension in his tone is borrowed from his vault of killers, blurring into him, tight jaw and pointed consonants. Anyone else would cower at the sound of it, but Margot Verger, who has known far deeper terror, does not flinch. Though she should, if she knows what's good for her.

“Are you a man... fully?”

“If you're asking if I have a cock, Miss Verger, the answer is yes.” And now, his teeth _are_ gritted.

He means to glower in her direction but catches her eye and falters. Though her words are sharp and insensitive, she has the look still of a deer in the headlights, wounded, girlish. “How did you... come to this information?”

Even Freddie Lounds has not (yet) dug so deeply. It's a wonder what a complete name change and 100mgs of testosterone a week will do for a man. He took a gap year after graduating high school and showed up for freshman year to study Criminal Justice as Will Graham, his other name and other body lost somewhere at sea and buried. The newborn Will dressed in layers and wore a thin scraggle of scruff on his chin. He took the bus once a month to his psychiatrist's office in downtown New Orleans.

“If you can look me up in Dr. Lecter's books, then I can do the same for you. He lists your former doctors.”

Will knows it is not carelessness on Hannibal's part. He sees it clearly: the doctor apologizing during her session and stepping briefly from the room (“ _urgent matters with another patient_ ”), a notebook from the session before left tucked beneath some papers on his desk, skewed just so to easily read Will Graham, in the margin a carefully printed notation of his former psychiatrist's name and New Orleans address, the nature of her practice readily apparent upon even a cursory search.

The issue of that transformation had come up only once, in one of their earliest sessions.

 _“I deal now only with the man before me,”_ said Hannibal. _“The girl who died in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 1999 bears no relevance to me or to you. That metamorphosis has transpired. My concern, as yours should be, is only this: what will you yet become?”_


	5. becoming part 1

He went under the knife first in Philadelphia, after an eighteen hour drive up winter break for a consultation.

Through the brown fog of the Blue Ridge Mountains, coming into the city with sparse snow breaking over the Delaware River. He had lunch tucked in wax paper, perched on a railing to watch the great behemoth of a cargo ship trail its wake across the water. _Soon_ , he thought as he fed the seabirds his extra fries. _Soon_ , to go under the dark surface and emerge reborn.

The surgeon poked and prodded, offered a compilation of results, a timeline of recovery. Here is where the scars will sit, just above where the ribs drop off. Here is what we will stretch and tear to reacquaint your own body with its origin.

In the womb, we are sexless, at least in the beginning. A mass of veins and thrumming organs still being weaved into life. The chromosomes at the first blink of meiosis are but a suggestion. The embryo, a blank slate. Cellular replication occurring without thought to the ultimate shape. For a time, the fetus floats in a void of ambiguity. The organs that may shape into another or not. The flesh being knit blood vessel by blood vessel in the hot darkness.

A weaver upon finding a flaw in the pattern, a missed stitch, may carefully repeat her steps in reverse. The vibration of the loom and fragility of the strings. To go backwards is to risk that the pieces will lose integrity, but to go on with the flaw remaining will spell certain doom for the pattern. Every stitch that comes after, just that much out of alignment, fragmenting.

Unlike dropped porcelain, the body can be coaxed to come back together. The healing begins with a stitch.

To heal a wound made before one was born requires more than stitches in the right places. There is no one moment of glorious transformation.

In the summer, Will Graham traveled again to Philadelphia and there, went under the water. He emerged with drains from the wounds in his chest and swollen in places he didn't know could swell. He had no one to help in recovery but convinced the hospital staff otherwise easily, spent the next few days sleeping fitfully in a motel bathtub. Close enough to hurl without moving more than necessary. Nestled in with a 24-pack of bottled water and a few boxes of saltines.

The scabs sloughed off his wounds black and clotted. The water ran brown when he finally bathed as best he could, unable to lift his arms much higher than his waist. He crouched in the dense fog of the shower, trembling. The drains oozed and then cleared and were pulled free at a followup visit a week on. It ached to breathe but not so much as it had before.

Back in New Orleans, he shed his layers. He wore a thin, white shirt that clung to his new chest, the air in his little kitchen sticky even with the windows cracked and fans going. A night moth batted at the worn screen. _Soon_ , he thought, pouring himself a glass of water at the sink, letting the tap flow over his hands, cold and clear. _Soon, to emerge from the water. Soon, to sluice through._

There is no one moment. It is not an epiphany, but a procedure. Here is where you press the needle. Here is the dosage. The bloodwork and the blood. The plans laid for the next cut, the cash scrounged up.

Will finds his every waking moment is surgery.

He is aided by a sharp jaw accentuated by thinness and by the boyish flop of his hair and by the wide set of his shoulders that gives more narrowness to his waist and by the inheritance of his mother's height and by a voice that threads with deepness quickly. 

And so, it happens. Will Graham drags himself to the surface of the water and pulls himself gasping to the shore. He follows the thread back to the flaw and tears it free with his teeth and makes the loom sing until the pattern comes back to him again. He thinks, _this is my final transfiguration of self. This is my most hard-won becoming._

And oh, how wrong he is.


	6. proof

“Why are you here, Margot?” you ask, though you know the answer.

 _A way out a way out a way out._ The rhythm of it is loud in her every movement. She has tried with a knife to slice her way free and now, try, try again.

No, you know just what she wants, see her bent over the desk to crack Lecter's book and peer at the neat scrawl. She has your address already, she has an in, she can stop in the cellar and procure a bottle of whiskey that would put any top shelf to shame. She has read about you, she has seen your mugshot, seen the photos of you at the trial. She knows the names of the girls you killed (that they say you killed the murders you were acquitted for).

She closes her eyes and sees a boy, a Verger boy, her own little floppy-haired Verger boy, and has to know _are you dangerous? Will my son be safe with this strange and unknowable man as a father?_

So she peers into Lecter's book and she reads the name and practice of a psychiatrist in New Orleans and she looks up the name and the practice and there is a moment where it clicks in her brain with a little thrum of disappointment.

But she comes to you anyway.

“I'm looking for a sperm donor,” she says and reaches to refill her whiskey. _A way out a way out a way out._

“I know,” you say. “But why are you here?”

“You mean because you don't have the right--”

“Because I don't have the right parts, yes. You knew that.”

“I didn't know for sure. I mean, can you ever really trust the things you see around Him? The things you know to be true?”

 _No._ No, you can't.

“You have your proof now.”

“I have my proof.”

“Who's next on your list then? After me.”

“Hannibal,” Margot says. “I want Hannibal.”


	7. clearer and clearer

The enveloping darkness of the museum, the vaulted ceilings appearing like the hull of a great ship rocking among towering waves. Something stirs in the shadowed passageways and something beyond, a behemoth twisting around the vessel. A black sea cut with stars. A dark shape, roiling.

He slicks the skin over the bones and pins it, pulls it smooth. He sees his fingers as if from far away. He sees the gauze that encircles his knuckles.

The skull he saves for last. These cuts had required more precision, a hand that guided, pointed out where to press the surgical knife so the scalp sloughed free. The room rocks and spins, but he has sea legs. He is the stillness at the storm's center. He holds the flesh over the skull and allows the dead man to bare his teeth.

_“Can you see you?”_

_“Clearer and clearer.”_

The thing that breathes in the dark gusts air against the back of his neck as he works, as he stands back to look. He does not look behind him to see the animal-shaped shadow. It speaks with the voice of the boy, but it is the stag's hoofsteps that stop at his back.

_“You made me a monument.”_

“You're welcome,” he says out loud. The living silence echoes back.

 _“The monument is not to me,”_ says the boy, says the stag. _“It's to you.”_

_“I gave you what you want. This is who are you. What you feel finally matches the reality of what I see.”_

He thinks of the moment before the glass burst inward. How for a blink of time, the window became a mirror, reflecting his own still face on the silhouette of the beast (first the boy and then the stag). He did not see fear in that face. Only a blankness, split when the panes shattered.

He did the killing with his hands. His fingers became fishhooks, and he pulled taut the line.

 _“This is a fledgling killer,”_ says the stag. “ _He has never killed before. Not like this.”_

He has killed and done it well, but no, not like this. He thinks of the girl who drowned in the Gulf so many years ago and the man who struck her dead. He thinks of the face held in that dark mirror with the twisting shape of the stag beyond. Is it the same man? Is it the same shape?

His body reflecting a new image. The scar tissue cut along his chest echoing the scar made before he was born echoing a scar he does not yet have.

 _“This is my becoming,”_ says the boy. _“And... it's yours.”_

“This is _my_ design,” he says, and it is. And it isn't.

The reality of what he sees is this: he doesn't know what he sees at all.


	8. conception

“Why Hannibal?” asks Will. “They have sperm banks for this, Margot. Hell, they have willing strangers at almost any nearby bar on a Friday night.”

“I want my baby to be safe,” says Margot. Safe? _Safe_ and whatever Hannibal is are concepts that exist on separate ends of the galaxy, ever retreating farther away. “Safe from my brother.”

“I would worry more about the prospective father.”

“I can't trust him?”

“Margot, I'm afraid that's an understatement.”

“You did try to kill him,” she says. “How do I know you're not the dangerous one?”

“You don't.” _Even I don't._ “You should be careful.”

“Don't worry,” Margot says. “I just need a simple donation. It doesn't have to be anything more than that.”

“It will be,” says Will. “It already is.”

“I need your help,” says Margot.

And Will gives it.


	9. sonnet for the manifesting

he traces each forked tributary back  
to find where something gurgles from the ground  
fists grip the bending tines gone slick and black  
but fail to feel where bone and velvet bound

the tree bears roots that strike into the deep  
the well flows up with water from the womb  
he wades into the quiet of the stream  
he casts the thread that thrums along the loom

what creature tore the wound that makes him ache?  
what light spills from the scars that soothe his chest?  
what god left him unfinished in Its wake?  
what can he do but hollow out the rest?

If man is only breath and beaten loam,  
then he can mold this body into home.


End file.
